The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

So as the FUD accumulated, it started to stall large parts of the facility. Rachmeler’s team worked to clear up the backlog but eventually it became evident that there was one item in particular that was causing the distribution center to go haywire—a missing pallet of Pokémon Jigglypuffs. The Amazon database insisted that the Jigglypuffs had been delivered to the facility, but if so, they were either misplaced or stolen. Although Rachmeler put together a search team, the task seemed nearly impossible. The group was looking for a single box inside an eight-hundred-thousand-square-foot facility. “It was very much like that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Rachmeler says. She dashed out to a nearby Walmart to buy a few pairs of binoculars and then passed them out among her group so they could scan the upper levels of the metal shelving. After three days of exhaustive searching, at two o’clock in the morning, Rachmeler was sitting, spent and dejected, in a private office. Suddenly, the door flew open. A colleague danced in, and Rachmeler briefly wondered if she was dreaming. Then she noticed that the woman was leading a conga line of other workers and that they were jubilantly holding above their heads the missing box of Jigglypuffs.